Exercise can feel like torture. When you work out, you get sweaty, you can’t breathe, you stink, you ache, you’re weak and shaky and exhausted…. You’re well aware that regular exercise is absolutely crucial to good health, but with that much misery involved, how can anyone expect you to keep it up—let alone to ever enjoy it? Fear not, friends! You can learn to love exercise, and it’s easier than you think: All it takes is an attitude adjustment. Don’t worry, we’re not going to tell you to “Suck it up, buttercup.” Today, we’re serving up the knowledge and practical advice you need to reprogram your attitude towards exercise so that you can stop dreading and feeling guilty about your workouts and start actually looking forward to them. First things first: addressing the problem. Ever wonder why the thought of exercise always seems to fill you with dread? To find the answer, we’ll have to get neuroscientific. Why You Still Hate Exercise (Even Though You Haven’t Done It in Years) You may remember from science class that the brain is filled with special cells called neurons. Every time we have a thought, these neurons create connections with each other, which enables the brain to store memories. The more times you remember or think about something, the stronger the path between neurons becomes—sort of like how a path in the woods becomes clearer and less grassy the more times you walk over it. When you think the same kinds of thoughts over and over again, you are actually forming and reinforcing neural pathways inside your brain that cause those thought patterns to become habitual. Once you’ve already carved out a clear path for a certain thought to form in response to a given stimulus, your brain begins to follow that path by default every time it encounters that stimulus. This means that most of the time, your negative thoughts and feelings aren’t a choice so much as they are a reflex. If you’ve always thought of exercise as being difficult and unpleasant, you’ll continue to think that way until you make a conscious effort to retrain your brain. So how do you do that? Change Your Mind, Change Your Body The strategy is simple: Fake it ‘til you make it. It sounds foolish, but it really works—for all its complexity...

In our last post, we explained how skipping meals is a surefire way to sabotage your own weight loss efforts. Now that you know what not to do, let’s talk about what you can (and should) do to boost your metabolism for weight loss success—but first, let’s gain some clarity. What is Metabolism, Anyway? Your body doesn’t just need energy for physical and mental activity; it also needs energy for all the “invisible” processes that sustain you, like breathing, repairing your cells, keeping your blood flowing, and producing and regulating hormones, among others. Metabolism refers to the series of processes the human body uses to convert food into life-giving energy. The digestive process plays a part in metabolism, and so do hormones like leptin, which signals to your body that you are full, and insulin, which allows sugar from the foods you eat to enter your cells so it can be used as energy. This energy is measured in units called calories. When you read the nutrition label on a package of food, the number of calories listed represents the amount of energy you can expect your body to obtain from one serving size of that food. Your body needs a certain number of calories each day to produce the energy it takes to keep itself functioning. Metabolism and Weight If we eat more than our bodies actually need, the excess calories are stored by the body in the form of fat. In the absence of food, our bodies can “burn”—that is, metabolize—this fat for energy. (You can see this principle in action by observing how certain animals “bulk up” during the fall to help their bodies survive the winter, when food is scarce.) However, if we continue to take in more food than is required for our bodies’ energy needs, over time our bodies will store more and more fat without ever having the chance to burn any of it. With so much stored energy, the metabolism slows down because it doesn’t have to work as hard to create energy from the food we eat. This is what causes weight gain. How to Speed Up Your Metabolism The good news is that revving up a sluggish metabolism is pretty straightforward, though the strategy may surprise you. So what’s the secret? Step 1: Work out to build muscle. Aerobic exercise...

Exercise can feel like torture. When you work out, you get sweaty, you can’t breathe, you stink, you ache, you’re weak and shaky and exhausted…. You’re well aware that regular exercise is absolutely crucial to good health, but with that much misery involved, how can anyone expect you to keep it up—let alone to ever enjoy it? Fear not, friends! You can learn to love exercise, and it’s easier than you think: All it takes is an attitude...

In our last post, we explained how skipping meals is a surefire way to sabotage your own weight loss efforts. Now that you know what not to do, let’s talk about what you can (and should) do to boost your metabolism for weight loss success—but first, let’s gain some clarity. What is Metabolism, Anyway? Your body doesn’t just need energy for physical and mental activity; it also needs energy for all the “invisible” processes that...

Detour to Disaster Sometimes we get impatient on the path to weight loss and start looking for shortcuts. It’s understandable that when you have someplace you really want to be, you want to get there as fast as possible. But rather than being a weight-loss shortcut, skipping meals is more like a bad detour—the kind that sends you in the opposite direction over a much bumpier path. Why Skipping Meals Doesn’t Work for Weight Loss...

Do you like to wiggle or tap your foot when you’re in a meeting or waiting for something? Do you pace back and forth when you are on the phone or find it hard to sit still? Despite what your mother (husband/wife/father/teacher/boss) has said, fidgeting may be a good thing! Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is simply energy that is expended by daily activities other than planned exercise.1 Two different studies have...